Robert Stark Interviews James J. O’Meara

Robert Stark interviews Counter-Currents contributor James J. O’Meara on the Voice of Reason Broadcast Network.

He deals with such topics as Traditionalism, homosexuality, the Jewish subversion of Western Civilization, the Männerbund, elitism, gay marriage, the criticism of popular culture, hallucinogens, mysticism, and more.

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With respect to Fear and Loathing, I remember liking Ralph Steadman’s art more than anything else in that book. Though there’s one great part in Fear and Loathing where he describes the rush of the 1960s and how it all receded like waves on a beach or something. I remember really liking that part. No one summed up that cultural rise and ebb of “flower power” better. Again, if you like Fear and Loathing, I suggest giving The Rum Diary a try. It actually has a climax that hits very close to home for many white nationalists (inadvertently, of course) but it’s one of his better works for other reasons as well.

Regarding Lester Bangs: I certainly remember a great deal of his appeal being his sort of elitism against the sort of mainstream acts like Boston and The Carpenters. This acerbic wit and attitude was captured brilliantly by Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of him in the otherwise lackluster Cameron Crowe film, Almost Famous. His attitude is one of a sort of reverse elitism (that comes very close to Marxist formulations of disdain for things that are better but not quite by virtue of its own implicit elitism); to put it another way, he rejected bourgeois (popular) sensibilities toward rock ‘n’ roll and pop culture and championed the underdogs or perhaps unrecognized genius to one degree or another.

I guess the reason his taste in music stands out for me more than any particular put down is because he had really directed me toward avant garde (a dirty word in right wing circles, I know) bands like the Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart and hard rock bands like The Stooges. Of course, I’m a bit older and can see that such bands had an unfortunate affiliation with left wing political causes that have undermined the very processes that made their music possible.

The Velvet Underground and The Stooges produced a lot of trashy music; but there were also some gems like Venus In Furs and Sunday Morning within the Underground’s catalog. I still sometimes think that a song like Sunday Morning can only be fully appreciated by a certain type of people. *cough* white people *cough* And The Stooges’ Gimme Danger and Search And Destroy are among the greatest rock songs ever produced. “I’m the runaway son of the nuclear A-bomb” is better ‘jive’ than anything a low IQ negro ever penned.

But when I was a younger lad listening to the cynical music off of Frank Zappa’s We’re Only In It For The Money (not a bad record, incidentally), I can remember reading Bangs’s articles on “Zappa’s crazy friend” who I’d heard about from time to time. This “friend” was Captain Beefheart, a man whom Bangs constantly championed. And when I listened to him finally, I was immediately hooked. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. It WAS NOT rock music. It was not always so pleasant sounding, either. There was a lot of atonal riffs and out of key (he always sang out of key!) nasally whining within some tracks. But the “listening experience” was more like an event than something you’re going to put into your record player and tap your feet and snap your fingers to. Though I didn’t realize this years ago, much of his avant garde music, like other “rock” music, was essentially a reclamation of a certain type of white musical syncopation from black blues artists who had borrowed from white folk music and gospel hymns. This reclaimed music, unlike the form it took under its colored predecessors such as Mississippi Fred McDowell and Howlin’ Wolf (who were good musicians, to be fair), had this distinctly white barbaric ferocity fused into it that to me is quite powerful. Tracks like Moonlight On Vermont and My Human Gets Me Blues are distinctly white creations despite the blues influence. It is music to this day that I can enjoy (well, a lot of it, anyways) even if Beefheart himself was a bit of a degenerate who didn’t always attribute the genius of his music to the right people. Because without extraordinary help from his band (The Magic Band), his atonal “vision” never would have been realized on his talents alone.

Whenever old Platonic fuddie duddies doubt that atonal music can be beautiful, I always refer them to this track:

I am now more than half-way through Fear and Loathing, and it most reminds me of Burroughs. What writers today come close to Thompson as a unique voice? Jim Goad is the only person who comes to mind.

I really love Captain Beefheart, and it was Bangs who turned me on to him.

But I don’t agree with Bangs’ proto-punk, garage band notions of Rock authenticity, though. It is musically retarding. I love Boston and The Carpenters and Journey, because Brad Delp, Karen Carpenter, and Steve Perry are superb singers, backed up by superb musicians. Thank God the best people who came out of the punk milieu discarded such dogmas and actually learned to play instruments and sing. Siouxsie and the Banshees, for example.

That’s a sixty-four thousand dollar question right there. Unquestionably, there are bound to be some interesting people out there (both on blogs and in print) who won’t be recognized except in hindsight even by dissident strands of opinion such as those found within the “alternative right.” I wish I could answer that question a bit better. I have a tendency to stray from contemporary writers even though it is unquestionably important to have one’s hand on the pulse of the zeitgeist. I have a buddy that subjects me to godawful mainstream pop music for that reason while he critiques it and tears it down and points out the ten seconds of each song he finds redeemable.

Goad is pretty hit or miss, I think. (But I guess that can be said about any sort of topical writer who’s perceived as a bit unhinged or erratic or neurotic.) I’m also only familiar with him from Taki’s so I can’t be said to be any sort of authority on him. It’s funny you mention Burroughs; I used to be a big fan of Charles Bukowski who is fairly contemporary and often mentioned in the same breath as Burroughs. But looking back, I think lot of his work was more destructive rather than constructive despite the wit of Ham On Rye and Post Office. His work, Women, comes across as “game” advice from the likes of Roissy were he an old man. It’s a bit much to stomach even if his insights were interesting for their crass and brutal honesty. There’s a lot of good material in his pages that taught me a lot about human psychology and re-enforced my anti-humanism, I guess. But a person still needs role models and he certainly doesn’t fit that bill. His message is also ultimately nihilistic (as opposed to “actively nihilistic”) and sort of plays into liberal sob stories albeit in a more masculine way than someone like Toni Morrison. Certainly, he was more of a preferable Beat writer (some of his poetry is pretty good) than someone vile like Ginsburg or even Kerouac who makes a lot of the same rough ‘n’ tumble things relayed by Thompson about as exciting as a box of Wheat Thins.

Actually, I think Jonathan Bowden has shades of a more cerebral, philosophical strand of Gonzo in his work, Mad (which has to be taken in in small doses if one wishes to not actually go mad himself). It has that same disorienting “I know I’m screwing with you while enlightening you at the same time” quality to it. I know you yourself said his fiction was unreadable. Heh. I have to agree to an extent.

Stepping outside of the “alternative right,” I can think of a couple writers who have struck me as unique but who are also no where near as unhinged (and perhaps less interesting by virtue of that). The first is actually a writer by the name of Matthew Crawford who has gotten mainstream publicity in The Times for his book, Shop Class As Soulcraft. Again, I wouldn’t say he has any sort of unique style, but his perspective is one that runs counter to the orthodoxy and not too many people can elaborate on the usefulness of Heidegger and how that relates to working on motorcycle engines.

With respect to music critics, there used to be this one writer on the internet I read who was quite instrumental (no pun) to turning me on to various underground/punk acts like the Melvins and The Cows and Fugazi. I think I’ll refrain from mentioning his name as I actually had a bit of a falling out with him on Facebook of all places (DRAMA). So I’m just not comfortable name-dropping him here. (He’d probably have a heart attack if he googled his name and Counter-Currents came up as I’ve found him to be an all too typical New Yorky sort of cosmopolitan type outside of the subject of music.) While his style is a bit puerile, his knowledge on pop music runs deep and he was better than most writers at communicating why he liked a certain song or record. To get his points across, his reviews often have an interesting, disorienting meta-quality to them. Then some of them are just plain bad. In fact, a lot of his reviews are really bad. But he did hit pay dirt from time to time by virtue of doing so many reviews. He’s creative, that’s for sure.

Strangely enough, he actually got quite a bit of press on Fox News’s Red Eye show which I never really watch for obvious reasons. Incidentally, it’s also a bit strange that Buzz Osborne (from the Melvins), David Brockie (from Gwar), and Glenn Danzig have all gotten some airtime on this program that tries and fails to make kosher conservatism “hip.” What the average, unimaginative gruff ‘n’ dry Fox News conservative must think when they turn on their sets and see Buzz Osborne when they expected to get Oliver North’s War Stories or O’Reilly’s “bloviating,” one can only imagine. So the host, despite being a detestable judeo-conservative who once wrote for a some terrible men’s magazine, still has some interesting musical tastes.

One last name I would drop is Alan Moore who wrote The Watchmen. I don’t know if anything else he created is as profound as The Watchmen, but that work, to me, is one of immense importance for reasons that he himself probably doesn’t even realize. I’ll also add that I think there are some good Japanese writers for this same genre (comics/manga) but I’ve jabbered on enough without even perhaps answering your question so I’ll leave it at that.

Also, I enjoy Boston and The Carpenters, too. I also enjoy *most* of Led Zeppelin’s output. But I completely get why they are “lame” to the Lester Bangs’s of the world. It’s a bit unfair, I admit. It’s probably their fanbase and bombastic nature more than anything that inspires such venom.

His perspective on homosexuality is interesting. Though I can’t remember if this was addressed in the interview or if I just read it on his blog, I think his point about the idealization of Aryan beauty within the male half of the species being “faggoty” by default in today’s “Judaic” paradigm is very insightful and has all sorts of implications that can explain much of the faux-macho crap we encounter today (particularly in the form of black culture). We scarcely know how to treat beauty and appreciate it within people because we only tie “beauty” (as spoken) with sex itself. Incidentally, I too was never on page with the “get a job and a haircut” crowd that so often oozes of superficial masculinity.

Essentially, the “Shakespeare was a fag” sort of memes are all used to level elitist sentiment which is really the birthright of Western peoples with respect to some of the other cultures that we are told are just as “valid.” If you enjoy Goethe and Beethoven and rightfully condescend to someone who’s, to borrow a word Jack Donovan coined, gyno-centric and reads only Maxim and Playboy, you’re just a “fag” instead of someone with a higher sensibility. The destructiveness of this popular dialectic on the Western spirit of masculinity is incalculable because dumping on great “faggoty” (read: aristocratic) men of the past is one of the only confrontational forms of expression that is permitted in “civilized, polite” discourse and yet confrontation is what men crave. It’s one more way Jews, in particular, set the rules and dictate where our instincts wander. You can attack white men of the past that Jews with their media have retconned into “racist” pansies, but negroes, “natives”, Jews, and just about anyone else is off limits.

I found it interesting that Hunter S. Thompson and Lester Bangs were an influence on his writing as well. They are two writers whose sensibilities I enjoyed when I was younger; I can still enjoy them today, in fact. I’d even go so far as to say that I agree with a lot Bangs’s taste in music to this day. Though I thought Fear & Loathing was bollocks. (I much prefer The Rum Diary and some of his other “Gonzo” tales involving the Hell’s Angels.)

All in all, an interesting interview that introduced me to a new blog.

I’ve never read Richard Cromelin. To be honest, I’ve never heard of him. But speaking from a personal standpoint, I think interviews where racialist thinkers like O’Meara attribute influence to thinkers that are normally associated with the left within popular culture are highly productive. This not only applies to writing, but music and film as well. I know I enjoy many films and records from a white nationalist perspective today that I enjoyed from a generic adolescent perspective over a decade ago. But white nationalists who can communicate the “relevance” of pop culture items in such a way do help our cause more than anyone who can cite demographic statistics in some professorial way (not that I want to shun or demean such people).

When white nationalists can derive value out of outlets like Rolling Stone and Creem, newcomers can understand that much of the teenage angst we all experience is not totally baseless (as modern “conservatives” like to pretend it is) and as a result they may warm up to our heretical stances; though Lou Reed, David Bowie, and Grace Slick would NEVER admit it, their brand of music could only be created with white genetics and sites like Counter Currents want to ensure that that blueprint lives on to create such beauty in the future. Secondly, this connection with pop culture shows other white people out there who are looking for their identity that we’re not all a bunch of narrow-minded “Nazi” (TM) occultists who embody the things the Jewish media tells them that we do. We don’t want to restrict their horizon to Wagner’s Valkyries (though I’d love it if more people appreciated Wagner). We actually have depth and are even interesting people to converse with if we’re actually given five minutes.

Though Hunter S. Thompson is far from my top tier of valued writers, I will say that his Gonzo Papers (a fair sampling of his “Gonzo” work) as well as my favorite work of his, The Rum Diaries (which may be based on actual events within his life though it basically reads like a novel), are both recommended. From a white nationalist perspective, I see Thompson as a sort of force of anti-matter against the status quo of secular piety. Though anyone can be cynical in this age, there is something about Thompson’s prose that snapped me out of my own personal liberal lobotomy.

Cromelin wrote music criticism for Rolling Stone, the LA Times, and other outlets. I read some of his Rolling Stone criticism when I was a teenager, using the Second Rolling Stone Record Guide as a tool for working my way through my older cousins’ huge record collections. I remember to this day some of Cromelin’s phrases, they were so apposite, e.g, he likened the Yes aesthetic to Chinese landscape painting, which — for some mysterious reason — completely opened up Yes for my appreciation.

Lester Bangs was a great writer too, although I remember the jokes and put downs and pans more than I remember any of his positive reviews being “right on.” Phrases still stick in my mind today too. E.g., Led Zeppelin as a bunch of Limey Lemon-squeezers. His pan of Bowie’s Hunky Dory is one of his worst misses ever. But he was dead-right about Zappa’s Flo and Eddie period work.

All this is more than juvenile nostalgia. I learned a lot about musical and literary style from these writers.

Another fundamental education in literary style that I got in my teens was reading Ray Bradbury, who just passed away. He was my favorite writer at the time, and he was the first writer whose sentences struck me as so beautiful that I would read them again and again to try to figure out how he did it.

On James O’Meara’s advice, I started reading Hunter S. Thompson, starting with his Kentucky Derby piece. I am now into Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He is a great stylist.